Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 3
as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race” (History Television,
n.d.:1-2). Several officers followed his suggestion, which resulted in smallpox epidemics among several
Aboriginal communities.
Very few were left to pass traditional knowledge as leaders, philosophers and healers to others in the
community. Surviving community members, deprived of experienced leadership and vast amounts of
traditional knowledge, became more reliant on European trade goods and more vulnerable to the
missionaries’ pressure to convert to Christianity. The Aboriginal way of life that enabled Indigenous
people to be masters of their socio-cultural universe for thousands of years was broken apart by disease,
violence, hunger, despair and an increasing reliance on the fur trade. When the fur trade finally collapsed
in the 1920s, Aboriginal people in North America suffered exorbitant asperity. Epidemics of tuberculosis
and influenza continued to decimate the population of Aboriginal communities. By the 1930s, officials
in the Canadian government assumed that the Aboriginal people were a dying race.
Defined as such, generation after generation, Aboriginal people began shutting out their sensory
perceptions, their needs and feelings and their hopes and dreams as individuals and as a social group.
Aboriginal people also ignored the fact they were shutting out everything to the point that this shuttingout
process began to fail to function. Instead, their raw memories of experienced trauma began to flood
into awareness; for many, it was without an understanding of where those memories were coming from.
Many Aboriginal people began acting out what could not be fully represented (or fully remembered) in
their own minds and a new kind of disintegration followed: alcoholism, drug addiction, violence,
sexual abuse and suicide. This acting out was like confronting ugly, faceless ghosts in a dark room: a
losing battle with the frightening shadows of the past.
Avoidance of awareness of experienced personal trauma or trauma collectively experienced in the near
and distant past is the way people protect themselves from painful and fearful experiences in the present.
In the introduction to her book, Trauma and Recovery, Herman says: “The ordinary response to atrocities
is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter
aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable. Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as
powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work” (1997:1).
The goal of any healing process is a recovery of awareness, a reawakening to the senses, a re-owning of
one’s life experience and a recovery of people’s enhanced abilities to trust this experience. In a successful
healing process, this will be coupled with the recovery of a social ability to create a new cultural paradigm,
to bring order out of what has been chaos. The aim of a healing process is to recover a full person
(culture) and to develop anew lost capacities for feeling and expression. The goal is to recover and
reintegrate the past into the present. Many different healing modalities have been proposed to deal
with the effects of trauma (and/or with the post-traumatic stress disorder) and it is believed that the
conventional treatment for PTSD does have a place in the initial phase of healing the effects of historic
trauma. The treatment usually has three principal components: 1) processing and coming to terms
with the horrifying and overwhelming experience; 2) controlling and mastering physiological and
biological stress reactions; and 3) re-establishing secure social connections and inter-personal efficacy.
The aim of these therapies is to help traumatized people move from being dominated and haunted by
the past to being present in the here and now, capable of responding to current exigencies with their
fullest potential. Thus, the trauma needs to be placed in the larger perspective of a person’s (or group’s)
78